From a judge’s gavel to paint brushes, Barrie’s David Murphy has lived a unique life.
After a life spent mostly in a courtroom — first as a lawyer with a big Toronto law firm and eventually as a high court judge in the Cayman Islands — the 73-year-old is enjoying a simpler life these days spent mostly in his basement art studio.
Born and raised in the city, Murphy says he has been painting for nearly 50 years, but it wasn’t until he started sneaking off to art classes once a week — while he was working in a large litigation firm in downtown Toronto in the 1980s — that he really began to love it.
“It sounds odd. It’s a time in your life where you’re probably the busiest, craziest and most frenetic in your career,” he tells BarrieToday. “I decided I wanted a diversion in law school and started copying Group of Seven paintings in oil just for fun.”
In 1989, Murphy moved to Hong Kong, where he spent the next seven years working as a law professor at the University of Hong Kong. And although he didn’t do a lot of painting during that time, he says he would find some time between classes to take the occasional class.
During that time, he experimented with watercolour and took classes in Chinese brush painting and art restoration. He also developed a research specialty in art law, published numerous scholarly articles on the subject, and lectured worldwide. He is also the author of a book on the legal aspects of the trade in Chinese art, published by Oxford University Press.
Murphy then moved to the Cayman Islands and spent the next four years as a high court judge, a career he admits left very little time for art.
In 2000, at the age of 51, Murphy retired and moved to Europe, where he once again picked up his paint brushes and started painting regularly.
“I started doing a lot of shows and exhibitions in Malta,” he says, adding he always knew he’d return to Canada.
Murphy, who returned to Barrie in 2013, says he has always been drawn to impressionists, and credits the famous Group of Seven for inspiring his own work.
“When people think of impressionism, they typically think of European impressionist painters without really appreciating we had our own school of impressionist painters here in Canada with the Group of Seven who were fabulous,” he says. “I think it was meeting A.Y. Jackson that really inspired me (and) it was probably around that time I started really enjoying going to art galleries.
“Back in those days, McMichael Gallery in Kleinburg was just jammed with Group of Seven paintings. … It was just a visual feast back then and that obviously influenced me,” Murphy adds.
Although most of his work over the years has featured landscapes and cityscapes almost entirely in oil, he says he has stepped outside of the box over the last few years and begun to move into abstracts using acrylic for a “change of pace.”
“Representational landscapes and cityscapes… that’s what I have done for decades, but not in a realistic style. I don’t like realistic art. I’d rather just take a photograph, so it’s impressionist,” he says.
An avid traveller, the COVID-19 pandemic put a damper on that for Murphy. He says he found himself in his basement studio filling time in the winters.
“I decided to try something different. I started churning out a lot of abstracts… largely experimental and I think some of them are pretty good,” he says. “It’s really just a matter of putting together colour and shapes in a pleasing combination.
“I like to be spontaneous. I am not one of these artists that agonizes over something for weeks. I just like to do it and move on.”
Murphy’s work is on display as part of a new one-man exhibition for the entire month of May in the Falls Gallery at the Alton Mill Art Centre, located at 1402 Queen Street W., in Caledon.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
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